Xu Yi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia, collaborated with Yun-Feng Xiao's group from Peking University and researchers at Caltech to achieve the broadest recorded spectral span in a microcomb.

Most technologies today rely on devices that transport energy in the form of light, radio, or mechanical waves. However, these wave-guiding channels are susceptible to disorder and damage, either in manufacturing or after they are deployed in harsh environments.

A major roadblock to producing safe, clean and abundant fusion energy on Earth is the lack of detailed understanding of how the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions behaves at the edge of fusion facilities called "tokamaks." Recent breakthroughs by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have advanced understanding of the behavior of the highly complex plasma edge in doughnut-shaped tokamaks on the road to capturing the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars. Understanding this edge region will be particularly important for operating ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the practicality of fusion energy.

Today's computers use the presence or absence of charge (0s and 1s) to encode information, where the physical motion of charges consume energy and cause heat. A novel alternative is to utilize the wave quantum number of electrons by which information encoding is possible without physically moving the carriers. This study shows that manipulation of the wave quantum number is possible by controlling the stacking configuration and the orientation of different two-dimensional materials.

Magnesium dimer (Mg2) is a fragile molecule consisting of two weakly interacting atoms held together by the laws of quantum mechanics. It has recently emerged as a potential probe for understanding fundamental phenomena at the intersection of chemistry and ultracold physics, but its use has been thwarted by a half-century-old enigma—five high-lying vibrational states that hold the key to understanding how the magnesium atoms interact but have eluded detection for 50 years.

In 1960, Maiman's first demonstration of the ruby laser initiated the beginning of the laser era. Solid-state lasers still comprise one of the most rapidly developing branches of laser science and has improved amazingly during last six decades while the gain media with good characteristics is essential for realizing a highly efficient solid-state laser.

A group of Skoltech scientists, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Southampton (UK), developed a fully optical approach to control the couplings between polariton condensates in optical lattices. This study is an important step toward the practical application of optical polariton condensate lattices as a platform for simulating condensed matter phases. The research results were published in the journal Physical Review Letters, where the paper was featured on the front cover.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found quasi-periodic flickers in millimeter-waves from the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius (Sgr) A*. The team interpreted these blinks to be due to the rotation of radio spots circling the supermassive black hole with an orbit radius smaller than that of Mercury. This is an interesting clue to investigate space-time with extreme gravity.

On February 19, 2019, the U.S. Space Force (USSF) was officially created with the signing of Space Policy Directive–4. This effectively broke it off from the U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSC) and made it into the sixth and youngest independent branch of the armed forces. Since then, the USSF has established a headquarters, taken on staff from the U.S. Air Force, and even produced a recruitment video.

Progress continues to speed along as NASA's Perseverance rover readies for its launch this summer. On May 11, the rover team at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida received the tubes tasked with holding the first samples collected at Mars for eventual return to Earth. A week later, the Atlas V launch vehicle that will hurl Perseverance to the Red Planet arrived at the launch site. Working together, personnel from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and United Launch Alliance in Centennial, Colorado, were also able to extend the rover's launch period by six days, from Jul. 17-Aug. 5 to Jul. 17-Aug. 11.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), installed on an Arizona mountaintop, was quickly moving through its testing stages and making headway toward the start of its 5-year observing run as project participants from around the world traveled to attend a DESI collaboration meeting in Tucson, Arizona, in early March.

NASA gave the green light on Friday to next week's launch of two astronauts aboard a SpaceX vessel—the first crewed space flight from US soil in nine years and a crucial step towards ending American dependence on Russian rockets.

Researchers from Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities have successfully tested and recorded Australia's fastest internet data speed, and that of the world, from a single optical chip—capable of downloading 1000 high definition movies in a split second.

A technology developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory could pave the way for increased fuel economy and lower greenhouse gas emissions as part of an octane-on-demand fuel-delivery system.

Russian researchers from HSE University and Open University for the Humanities and Economics have demonstrated that artificial intelligence is able to infer people's personality from 'selfie' photographs better than human raters do. Conscientiousness emerged to be more easily recognizable than the other four traits. Personality predictions based on female faces appeared to be more reliable than those for male faces. The technology can be used to find the 'best matches' in customer service, dating or online tutoring.

Our internet connections have never been more important to us, nor have they been under such strain. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made remote working, remote socialisation, and online entertainment the norm, we have seen an unprecedented spike in society's demand for data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced public health, supply chain, transportation, government, economic and many other entities to interact in real time. One of the challenges in large systems interacting in this way is that even tiny errors in one system can cause devastating effects across the entire system chain.

The fortunes of US billionaires rose 15 percent in the two months since the coronavirus pandemic hit, a study found, with Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg seeing massive gains.

A contact tracing app pushed by the governors of North Dakota and South Dakota as a tool to trace exposure to the coronavirus violated its own privacy policy by sharing location and user identification information with third-party businesses, according to a report from a tech privacy company.

Whether physical distancing measures are implemented by businesses as people start to return to work, Amazon workers will continue to work in close quarters both during and after the coronavirus crisis subsides.

A U of T Mississauga researcher is challenging naïve assumptions that technology can be easily controlled or grounded by policy and law, arguing that all technologies will be weaponized as the military establishment continues to seek increasingly sophisticated systems.

T-Mobile really wants to connect with local and state police, fire and emergency medical departments—by offering them free cellular service, including 5G connectivity.

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